In a London courtroom, Holocaust
denier David Irving gets to argue the details of
the persecution of the Jews against the world's leading
experts.

BY HEATHER WORLD

The bland yellow courtroom in London's
Royal Courts of Justice is an odd setting for a debate about
the Holocaust. The questions sound like the start of
tasteless jokes: How much hydrogen-cyanide gas does it take
to kill a room full of people? How many corpses fit onto an
elevator floor? How many people can one gassing van deliver
to death in a day?

Yet the answers have become pieces of evidence in a
British
libel trial that litigants on both sides hope will
define the parameters of debate about what many call the
greatest moral crime of the 20th century.

On one side of the fluorescent-lit courtroom stands the
British author David Irving -- revisionist historian,
Hitler apologist or liar, depending on whom you ask -- who
does not believe the Nazis systematically killed Jews in
World War II. They died, he says, from disease or by the
hand of "rogue Nazis." Irving stands alone on his side of
the courtroom, for he has chosen to represent himself in a
case that both sides agree is so complicated that a judge,
and not a jury, should hear it.

On the other side of the room sits the target of his
suit, Deborah Lipstadt, a professor from Emory
University in Atlanta, Ga., who wrote "Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
Lipstadt, Emory's Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies, called Irving "one of the most dangerous
spokespersons for Holocaust denial." She and others
criticized his American publisher, St.
Martin's Press, for picking up his latest book,
"Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich," in 1996. The book
was dropped before it was published.

Lipstadt and a representative from her fellow defendant,
Penguin Books Ltd. (UK), are surrounded by a team of
black-robed English lawyers and university researchers, all
paging through files, leafing through books, typing notes on
laptop computers and writing messages to each other on
Post-it notes.

British law divides the duties of attorneys in a
courtroom, between the solicitor who gathers the evidence
and builds the case, and the wig-wearing barrister who puts
these arguments to the judge. Lipstadt has a star team: Her
solicitor is Anthony Julius, who represented
Princess Diana in her divorce. Her barrister is
Queen's Counsel Richard Rampton, a big name in
British libel circles.

Both sides plead their case to Justice Charles
Gray, formerly a premier libel lawyer himself and a
relative newcomer to the bench. Gray has given Irving great
leeway in presenting his case, for fear of putting a person
with no legal experience at a disadvantage. The trial, which
began Jan. 11, is scheduled to last three months.

If this were an American libel court, the judge and
barristers would not wear wigs and Irving would have the
burden to prove he'd been defamed ("with malice" in his
case, as with all public figures). But this is a British
libel court, and the burden is on the defense to prove
Lipstadt told the truth when she wrote that Irving bends
historical evidence "until it conforms with his ideological
leanings."

Barrister Rampton's job -- which he does while pacing,
tying the sleeves of his robe behind his back and adjusting
his wig -- is to prove Irving deliberately misread,
misinterpreted or missed key historical documents.

Irving's differences with the vast body of Holocaust
scholarship are not subtle. He does not think gas chambers
existed for mass extermination. They were used, he says, to
delouse clothes and disinfect corpses. He does not believe
Hitler devised the Final Solution.

The word "Holocaust" was removed from the second edition
of his book "Hitler's
War," because he finds the term "misleading, offensive
and unhelpful. It is too vague, it is imprecise, it is
unscientific and it should be avoided like the plague."

Despite this, Irving claims Lipstadt defamed him by
labeling him a "Holocaust denier," marking him with "a
verbal Yellow Star."

But the British author is after what he sees as a bigger
enemy, as well. He says his reputation has been destroyed by
an "organized international endeavor," which, upon closer
inspection, comprises mostly Jewish lobby groups like the
Anti-Defamation League
and the Board of Deputies
of British Jews. Their members have prevented him from
publishing his books, speaking at universities and traveling
to certain countries, he says.

Irving is banned even from Germany, where he has done
much of the 40-odd years of research for his 30 books,
because he violated that country's law against denying the
Holocaust.

This week the trial's big news was Israel's decision to
release the pre-execution memoirs of Adolf Eichmann,
to help Lipstadt with her case. The computer disk containing
an estimated 600 pages was handed over to Irving after he
promised not to publish it on his Web site.

Irving is good at sliding out
from many of the accusations against him. It is true, as
he has argued at the trial, that historians do "make
mistakes" and can be "caught out by fresh documents that
come into their purview." And in fact, scholars debate
when the Final Solution became the Nazi answer to the
"Jewish question" as well as other important facets of
the Holocaust. Irving posits himself as a man taking part
in these debates.

There is no "smoking gun" order from Hitler calling for
the destruction of the Jews, he reminds the court often.
There is no "smoking gun" blueprint for gas chambers at
Auschwitz.

And, of course, he is right.

On the surface he sounds believable. His tall,
square-shouldered frame reflects his inner confidence over a
mastery of obscure Nazi documents and wartime history. He
bounces on his feet as he fences verbally with Rampton.

His comments cause a flurry of scribbling, as Holocaust
survivors, Irving supporters, tourists, law students,
professors and scruffy courthouse regulars take notes on
whatever is available: envelopes, small notepads,
newspapers. Reporters from Germany, Israel, Australia and
the United States sit nearby, filling notebooks with
Irving's words and the arguments from the defense. Most days
the stern court clerk places a "Court Full" sign on the
door, barring entry to more who wait in the narrow
corridor.

Sometimes the trial is a jousting match, with historical
documents and incidents as the lances. "What do you take to
be the meaning of the phrase found in Wetzel's letter to
Lohse of 25th October 1941 ..." starts Rampton, and Irving
shoots back: "I am familiar, you remember, with the Tesch
trial ..."

Other times, the debate is more disturbing:

"They also retrieved a paper sack, marked on it a weight
of 25.5 kilograms of hair, which they say was taken from the
corpses of females after gassing and before burning in the
crematorium ovens in Birkenhau," said Rampton. "Twenty-five
point five kilograms of hair in total is the hair of about,
what, 500 women?"

"I do not know," Irving answered. "I have not done any
calculations. It seems to me you would have had to have a
bag the size of an elephant to make it weigh 50 pounds of
human hair."

The living faces of the Holocaust visit the trial as
well. Michael Lee, a 76-year-old survivor of
Auschwitz, comes every week.

"The whole thing is surreal to me," he said. "I can't
believe they argue dates and translations of words when
I actually witnessed the horror
of the whole thing."

People like Irving worry him, he said, because they plant
seeds of doubt. "Now there are a lot of witnesses still
alive," he said, "but in 20, 30, 40 years there won't be
anybody left."

But Irving argues that even the testimony of survivors
and eyewitnesses is unreliable. He rejects all eyewitness
testimony about gas chambers at Auschwitz, for instance,
most of it presented during the Nuremberg trials after the
war. He thinks former camp officials lied to cooperate with
Allied investigators to save their necks, and former inmates
trumped up stories as revenge on their captors. On the other
hand, he accepts without skepticism accounts by Hitler's
adjutants when they exonerate the Fuhrer.

And while Irving accuses "establishment" historians of
overlooking documents he has discovered, he rejects out of
hand key documents that have been a foundation of mainstream
Holocaust history. He ignores, for instance, the astounding
death tolls listed in reports from the Einsatzgruppen, the
mobile killing units that shot Jews and communists caught
behind the German advance eastward. (One
report listed 363,211 Jews killed in the last third of
1942.) Such figures are probably inflated, he said, to "show
off."

Other times Irving defends himself by saying he just made
mistakes. He misread an "order
from Hitler" to SS leader Heinrich Himmler to
spare one trainload of Jews from Berlin as an order to spare
all Jews. Further probing by the defense showed Himmler
issued the order before meeting with Hitler anyway.

But the defense says Irving's "mistakes" and
interpretations point in one direction only: toward the
exculpation of Hitler and the denial of the systematic
slaughter of the Jews because they were Jews.

The defense has also tried to link Irving's mistakes to
what it describes as his racism and right-wing ideological
bent. For two days the court listened to Irving's past
speeches in which he said black news anchors should be
allowed to report only on muggings and drug busts, and that
he "shuddered" to have his passport checked at British
immigration control by a "Pakistani." The defense recited a
rhyme Irving taught his 9-month-old daughter that made
headlines in the British press the next day: "I am a baby
Aryan/not Jewish or sectarian/I never will marry an/ape or
Rastafarian."

He has also claimed that Jews bring misfortune upon
themselves by virtue of their race. "If I was a Jew, I would
be far more concerned, not by the question of who pulled the
trigger, but why; and I do not think that has ever been
properly investigated," Irving once said. "There must be
some reason why anti-Semitism keeps on breaking out like
some kind of epidemic."

Still, Irving thinks he is winning this case, as his Web
site makes clear. He hides nothing: He posts full transcripts
of the trial (until the transcript company forbade him to do
so Feb. 7), he posts links to every press clipping
(regardless of how unfavorable it is to him) and he writes a
"Radical's Diary," in which he shares his take on the day's
proceedings.

The loser of this trial must pay its entire cost, which
could mean financial ruin for Irving. But in some ways, he
could win no matter how the sober-faced Judge Gray rules.
Deborah Lipstadt refuses to debate Holocaust deniers because
"it would elevate their anti-Semitic ideology to the level
of responsible historiography," according to the first
chapter of the book at the heart of this lawsuit.

But through his lawsuit, David Irving has entered the
ring with the world's leading Holocaust historians. He has
had his day in court.